An Unusually Unremarkable Year in Books (For Me Anyway)

A Surprising Novel About Horses Leads My 2023 'Best Reads' List

It was a rough year for me on a personal level, saying goodbye to both my mother and father just six weeks apart this spring. Early in 2023 I didn’t have much time for my favorite pastime of reading given the stress levels in my life and the numerous travels to and from Tucson to be there for my folks. Despite this, I did manage to read nearly 20 books during the year, including one a month for my book club. Ultimately, I’d have liked to get to an average of two per month but sometimes life has other plans.

Still, the year was full of interesting and thought-provoking reads led by my favorite novel of the year, Horse by Geraldine Brooks. This novel reiterates exactly why I am in a book club — I never would have picked it up were it not for another member of the club choosing it as our August selection. Horse, the sixth novel from the Aussie and 2005 Pulitzer winner for March, is the story of a thoroughbred horse and his relationship with his enslaved groomer during the Civil War. While the book is fiction, it is based on real race horse Lexington. Honestly, I didn’t know I could care about a racehorse but Lexington’s story is beautiful and tragic and Brooks weaves in bevy of real and fictional characters that come together in relationship to this wonderful animal. The novel is educational, interesting, mysterious, and emotional all at once.

The only other book that earned five out of five stars for me this year was The Epicureans by Charles McNair. My friend Charles is a slightly demented dude, which is one of the reasons his work is so interesting and fun to read. The Epicureans is about a mysterious cabal of super wealthy people who come together once a year to dine on a meal that is sumptuously evil. Charles, whom I met in the late 1990s while working in Atlanta and with whom I have remained friends, is a gifted storyteller with a style that I like to describe as Vonnegut with a twist of Alabama gothic.

My four out of five star list includes:

• The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.
  I highly recommend this novel by one of America’s best novelists.

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.
  One of my favorite authors hits another home run (and wins another Pulitzer) with this tale of a young boy coming of age in Oxycontin-riddled Appalachia.

• Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby.
  Required reading for everyone who wants to understand the intricacies of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Tishby shares her own family history in Israel and writes in clear, plain language with a touch of humor.

• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann.
  Far better than the film, and you may even be able to read it in less time than it takes to watch Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour adaptation.

• The Rosie Project (Don Tillman, #1) by Graeme Simsion.
  Fun story. Sheldon Cooper meets Miss Marple.

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
  Even if you’ve never played a video game in your life you’ll enjoy this coming of age story about friends coming together to take on the world of gaming.

Three out of five stars:

• Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton.
  Nice read. George Clooney made it into a movie called The Midnight Sky.

• The Stranger by Albert Camus.
  Second read as I’ve been thinking more about philosophy these days. I pretty much agree with Camus that life is absurd.

• The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer.
  What would you be willing to do to save the historical record of your ancestors? Would you face certain death at the hands of terrorists?

• Trust by Hernan Diaz.
  This one shared the 2023 Pulitzer with Demon Copperhead. I don’t think it’s nearly as good, but I’m a biased Kingsolver fan. This was a little confusing, but unique.

• Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher.
  If you’ve ever written a recommendation letter for someone you’ll get a kick out of this little book.

• Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson. Powerful words about race, told as if Dyson was writing directly to victims of police violence.

• The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.
  I loved Ozeki’s first novel A Tale for the Time Being so much this one was never going to live up to that one. Just okay for me. A little hard to stay with.

• Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta.
  I’m not sure we needed a sequel to Perrotta’s brilliant novel Election, but we got it anyway. Maybe he felt like he was too harsh on Tracy in the first book so he had to find some way to redeem her character. But I think Tracy Flick was a great literary villain and coming back to her as an adult turned out to be somewhat disappointing for me. Perrotta is a genius but this one felt contrived. Read Election, or Little Children, or The Leftovers instead.

• Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Nobody covers climate in long form as well as Naomi Klein. She’s one of my idols. This book is different for her, though no less interesting. She has long been confused with another female Jewish writer named Naomi — Naomi Wolf. Unfortunately, Wolf went off the deep end during Covid and has become a darling of the anti-vax right and the Bannon-led takeover of “mirror world” America. Klein goes into depth explaining what this has done to her, and takes down Wolf in the process. I liked it, but would have liked more about why people believe conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated political gobbledygook.
  

Two out of five stars:

• Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2) by Colson Whitehead.
  Meh. I really liked the first book in Whitehead’s Harlem series Harlem Shuffle, but this one was a dud. Still, Whitehead is one of the world’s premier novelists so get out there and read The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys!

• Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year by Jimmy Breslin.
  My baseball read in 2023 was sold as a funny take down of the terrible first year (1962) of the New York Mets baseball franchise that lost 120 games. It should have been hysterical, but Breslin chose instead to focus on New York politics and the origins of the franchise rather than the exploits of Marv Throneberry, Don Zimmer, Casey Stengel and the rest of the gang. Every spring I read a baseball book to get ready for the season…this year for the first time I chose a stinker. I should have guessed a book about the Mets would suck.

Here’s looking at you 2024. First up, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann.